Rick Perry's Federalism: Another Lost Cause

Dan Drezner tweeted this afternoon that Barack Obama vs Rick Perry would be the starkest choice between rival philosophies and policies since Johnson-Goldwater in 1964. That might well be true, particulalry if you limit the question to domestic policy. Perry is barely out of the traps, of course, and already people are rushing to argue he’s a dangerous lunatic. Matt Yglesias, for instance, reads Perry’s book Fed Up and picks out ten of its “weirdest ideas”. Among them, apparently:

5. Almost Everything Is Unconstitutional: Regrets the existence of jurisprudence construing the Commerce Clause to permit “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” Perry makes a partial exception for laws barring racial discrimination which he says fulfill “the intent behind the passage of the Reconstruction Era amendments.” (page 51)